Month: September 2018

Why I didn’t report. Why I wish I did. Why I would testify… if I saw my attacker was nominated as a Supreme Court Justice. Rutgers University 2001 It was my senior year and I lived off campus with two other roommates. We weren’t huge party people, all of us got good grades and went on to graduate and have solid careers. (Not that any of that really matters to the story.) Our favorite local bar was one block away, so we would walk down for drinks on weekend nights and sometimes for Happy Hour. I turned...

I have always had a rather complicated relationship with Irish music. I both love it (I am listening to it right now, ‘The Fields of Athenry,’ to be precise), and I get ultimately frustrated with it. There is a reason I gravitated towards the Pogues when I was a young man, and when I picked up a guitar to play, I punked it up. Having said that, there are some traditional Irish songs I can listen to over and over and over again once more. ‘Cúnla’ is just such a song, I have loved this song since I was...

Charles Bernstein’s subway poem powers up our second season of “Car Poems.” With jarring beats that capture the physical rhythms and disorientations of commuting, this 31st installment electrifies the subterranean struggles of New York City’s strap hangers. *** The Alphabet of the Tracks A’s on the F & D’s the C, but only in sector B, then runs on N till becoming A again. R’s local on express, otherwise it’s think Q & G. L skips all stops while O terminates unexpectedly: take shuffle bus if available or transfer to V when possible . no weekend service on M,...

Dilly Dally Heaven Partisan My generation is always dissing on the Millennials for this, that, and the other thing. They eat too many avocados. They think they’re the first generation to get screwed. And so on. But one wonderful thing that the kids have done is give us a 90s alternative rock revival. Big, loud guitars. But they’ve taken Gen X one step better, it tends to be women behind these guitars. Think Courtney Barnett. Or Camp Cope. Or Jenn Cloher (to be fair, she’s one of us, she’s my age). And so on. So that brings us to the Toronto outfit, Dilly Dally. Along with having a great name, Dilly Dally bring the noise. Their first album, Sore, came out in 2015, and was long-listed for the Polaris Prize. And they toured the hell out of the album and nearly imploded. So it took awhile for the band to recover and regroup. And then, of course, the global clusterfuck of 2016-17. And so, frontwoman Katie Monks had to dig deep for the songs on their stellar new album, Heaven. Heaven hits hard. Very hard, and lead guitarist Liz Ball hits like a tonne of Billy Corgan filtered through the past three decades. Monks and Ball are like Corgan and James Iha Redux. But I feel this does them a disservice, they’re not the Smashing Pumpkins II. They’re better than that. They’re...

Matthew Rotando inaugurates our new section, “Anti-Genre,” with writings that inhabit the undefined world between poetry and prose. The mixed media image featured here is from a series of Rotando’s blood drawings: he hikes, mountain bikes, bangs against rocks, and sometimes bleeds. When this happens, he pushes drops of blood around on a piece of sketch paper, lets it dry, and then does an ink drawing on top of the blood picture that formed. Finally, he photographs the drawing and renders in different ways using a photo effects program. *** Fun World Here is my blank. It smells of...